by Donna Leon
Art’s a mugger and can knock us down whenever it wants. It can lie lurking in a poem and surprise us with joy; it can hide in the lines of a drawing, the curve of the R in an illuminated manuscript. Or it can slide out from behind Iago’s sneer. For some of us, it comes most powerfully in those perfect moments when the voice, always the voice, goes there and rests just there and, in the doing, sets our spirits free.
Confessions of an
American Handel Junkie
Nearly two decades ago, I had the great good fortune to meet, and then become a friend of, Alan Curtis, the American conductor and musicologist. We chatted, we laughed, and then we confessed. Though Alan’s name is linked with that of Monteverdi, he leaned across the table and whispered that Handel was his favorite composer. I sighed, much in the manner of the person who finds another true believer in the midst of the heathen.
Time passed, and we decided to proselytize, though we did not see it that way, not really. He had the orchestra, I knew the organizer of a music festival who was looking for two operas to present that summer, and together we found the singers. More time passed, and with it Alan and Il Complesso Barocco have recorded more than ten Handel operas, the most recent of which, Giulio Cesare. And all of it—the late-canceling singers, the evenings spent in Diva Dienst, the singers bursting into tears in front of the microphone—has been more glorious fun than either of us could possibly have imagined at the beginning.
I am not a musician. I cannot read musical notation. I don’t know music theory. I am a camp follower, a groupie, call it what you will: I am a pair of ears, attached to a heart, that has listened to Handel’s music, to the near total exclusion of other music, for more than a decade. But—and I think this is an important but—I can still be whammed by the music of others: Donizetti makes me wild, a decent Butterfly reduces me to a quivering jelly, and well-sung Mozart is almost always sublime.
It is our great good fortune—and that plural includes you, gentle reader, even if you don’t know it—to live in the era of the Handel revival. Fifty years ago, his operas sat in libraries or in the scornful footnotes of musicologists. They were seldom performed or, when they were, they were performed in the manner of the day, which means badly, with the parts for contraltos or castrati written down an octave, with the resulting effects on coloratura.
The plots—magical, irrational, absurd—were seen as ridiculous in an age that preferred realism, even in Hollywood films. And men singing with high voices? Puhleeze, darling; no one could think of such a thing.
But here we are, half a century later, in an age that adores transgression, and who better to meet our needs than Handel? Wild, unrealistic plots: Armida arrives in a chariot drawn by dragons; can James Bond beat that? Medea is carried off by two more: take that, Harry Potter. A female character dresses up as a man to try to seduce the new girlfriend away from the man they both love. You want transgression? I once overheard a woman at the prima of Il Trionfo di Tempo e Disinganno in Zurich rejoicing that “the evening was a triumph for lesbianism,” news that the exclusively heterosexual cast greeted with a similar bemusement.
Now that the music has been hoisted back up to where Handel intended it to be, singers can again sing long passages in a single breath, stunning audiences with their virtuosity and—I’ve seen it happen, had it happen—driving the listeners wild.
I have had a number of experiences that confirmed me in my Handelian faith. Some time ago I was invited to attend a performance of that jewel in the crown of Wagnerian genius, that triumph of all musicality, Tristan and Isolde, invited, I might add, by the Isolde, who is a friend. I went, and after a while the circumstances in which I found myself seemed strangely familiar, though I had been to only one other Wagnerian opera in my life. Was it the peculiarly earnest, one might almost say joyless, audience? Was it the drone of the music? Was it the composer’s lack of sympathy for the beauty of the singing voice?
It was not until the middle of the interminable second act that memory graced me. When I was teaching in China in the late seventies my students described the struggle sessions they had attended during the Cultural Revolution. There around me were the loyal cadres, sitting joyless as the sound of the Chairman’s voice rang above them and around them. A higher truth was being revealed, a vision of a finer life, passionate commitment to principles to which I dared not aspire. All about me, dark destruction and passionate excess were leading the way toward ineluctable death.
And then came illumination. It was not a struggle session. Nothing of the sort. It was, instead, the night at the local pub when the town drunk sat down beside me and started to tell the story of his long, tortured marriage. Up and down, years passed, good and bad, happy, sad, always wanting something better, something different, and listen to how he yearned and suffered. Yet never did he speak a simple, comprehensible sentence with subject, verb, direct object. At the end of the second hour of his story, I was still waiting for him to make some definite point worthy of remembering. But no, he had barely begun, and there was the whole long middle period to tell me, and then the third act to endure.
The very next day and the day after that—sure proof that the world is in the hands of beneficent powers—I was able to attend two three-hour rehearsals of Handel’s Semele. Very same theater, some of the same musicians, but there the resemblance—oh praise the Lord in word and song—ended.
Where the first evening I had longed for a simple declarative sentence, Handel gave me an endless run of them: A, B, A. Say it, reflect upon it, say it again with elaboration. I thought of Wilkie Collins’s advice about writing: “Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry, make ’em wait.” The previous evening, I’d spent long hours feeling like the only sober person in a room full of drunks; worse, I’d emerged from the room without a single bit of music stuck inside my ear, and I most decidedly did not want more.
Anyone possessed of a sober mind and a sense of fair play cannot, after reading through the libretto of Tristan, so much as whisper a word of criticism against Handel’s libretti, least against that of Semele, written by William Congreve, one of the great dramatists of his age. Wagner chews over love and lust and obsession for more than three hours; Handel tells us everything we need to know in four words—“Endless pleasure, endless love”—and he tells us with a tune that is still in our ears while showering the next morning.
Isolde tries our patience with her list of desires; Semele stands and delivers this: “Oh no, I’ll take no less than all at full excess.” Well, she is in love with Jupiter, isn’t she, so perhaps we must allow her a bit of room for full excess. And Handel gives it to us in aria after head-spinning aria.
Perhaps it is these words, “Endless pleasure, endless love,” that summon up Handel’s musical genius. Like Dickens, he was a popular entertainer and thought of himself as such. He had no great theories, no great life concepts, did not see himself as the person destined to change the course of musical history. He was a workman who wanted to give endless pleasure to his public. He did so, at least for me and the other opera junkies, with effortless, endless skill.
When Handel’s audience tired of Italian opera, he did not try to persuade them to remain faithful but switched his genius to the writing of religious oratorio, and into them he poured the same passion, the same joy, the same empathy for loss. Only a stone could listen to Messiah and not believe.
He didn’t have to take his public aside and explain to them about this leitmotif and that chord, which would resonate then and then and then, or the alternating this and that, and only then you’ll hear how beautiful the music is. He turned out tunes, melodies, music that flowed in a seemingly—thank God—endless stream from his pen. His goal was to delight, and in his music one hears what a happy, happy man he was. His music, at least for unmusical me, is full of cheer. And full of glory and passion and sublimity and darkest tragedy as well. But always cheer. He’s given me endless pleasure, and I shall c
ontinue to give him what he deserves: endless love.
Da Capo (Callas)
Maria Callas was the most interesting singer of the century. Not the best, whatever that means, and certainly not the most popular, but decidedly the most interesting. Vocally, she managed to surprise, to keep her listeners perpetually on the edge of their ears, waiting for that perfectly felt phrase that would ring in the memory years later or, increasingly as she came to the end of her career, for that terrible ripping of the voice that showed just how bad things were going to become.
I never saw her sing. I know the voice only from disc and, in some cases, from the memories of friends who did see her. All of them speak with reverence of what she did in the theater, and all of them say that their brief hours in the theater with Callas were the high points of their listening and viewing lives.
She is interesting socially, as well, for she was the first of the household-name singers, if I may call them that. Before her, there was Caruso and, a century before, Maria Malibran, dead at twenty-eight. But Callas was the first mass-produced diva, and it is this quality that caused me to risk my life to hear her sing.
Fresh out of university, working in New York, I knew little about opera except that I liked the sound of it, liked all those stout ladies who sang of love and death; further, I loved the cheap melodrama of the stories, all that passion, all that rage, that lust for vendetta. Well, I was younger then.
In March of 1965 Callas made what were to be her farewell appearances in New York, two performances of Tosca, a vulgar potboiler I wouldn’t today cross the street to hear. The press had hyped it up—Callas Callas Callas—and so I wanted very much to see this singer I’d heard only on records. Tickets were sold out months in advance, not a seat to be had at any price. The hysterical demand for tickets was the result of the same sort of hype that helped to create the Beatles and Elvis, only it didn’t seem like that because this was opera. But it was.
The day before the performance, all of my efforts to buy a ticket having failed, I went down to the office building of the old Met on Broadway and cased the joint. The next day I returned after work, hid myself in a cubicle of the ladies’ room, and sat there until the building emptied. About fifteen minutes before the performance, I took the elevator to the fourth floor and proceeded—I tremble at the memory of my rashness—to crawl across a wooden plank, four stories up, that connected a window of the building with the top of the back wall of the old Family Circle. No, I didn’t look down.
Arrived at the back entrance, I was knocking at the door, hoping someone inside would open it and let me in to stand and see Callas Callas Callas, when two Pinkerton guards came, found me, and tossed me out. So I never saw Callas live.
Today the megasinger has become common: they open soccer matches and sing at Wembley Stadium. But listen to the discs of Callas singing, watch the few hours of film that exist of this phenomenal singer on the stage, and you will see and hear the difference. These others, today, are mere entertainers. She was a singer. I’d risk my life again to see her, even to see her sing Tosca. But today I’d do it not because of the hype but because she is and remains the most sublimely gifted singer of the century. May she rest in peace, troubled soul.
Anne Sofie von Otter
There is, as the English would say, no side to the mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, no attempt to project the image of the diva whose talent sets her apart from mere mortals. In its place there is a similarly English reserve and something that was once called dignity. She is, after all, the singer whose talent Cecilia Bartoli has called “majestic.” Even a brief meeting suggests that she learned politeness as an infant. The reserve, of which she is refreshingly proud, flashed to the surface during our conversation in Vienna when she remarked, “People are, after all, afraid of me,” though her grin splattered the remark with irony. Part of that fear no doubt comes from the austere appearance of the classic Nordic ice queen: tall, blonde, clear and direct of gaze. The complete absence of self-importance and the humor and wit that bubble up in her conversation, however, quickly melt that image.
Further, the reserved manner is something she has had to learn, as many singers must. In the beginning of her career, she said, she drew no line between her personal and her professional life, and she now seemed to regret some of the confusion that resulted from having presented herself as affable and friendly to people she later came to realize were interested in her only because of her talent or her fame. One suspects that, however friendly and affable the professional woman might appear, she spends a fair bit of time on the other side of the rampart she has built between official and private. As her career progressed, she said, she had to separate her life into two sides, and she adds that it was a wise decision, something she believes necessary for all singers. Like many famous sopranos and mezzos, she has had her fair share of fans who can most politely be described as excessive, though one suspects that excess would not long survive her displeasure.
As we spoke, lines of Andrew Marvell came to mind: “But at my back I always hear / Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.” However unlikely it might be that this seventeenth-century English poet had the plight of twenty-first-century sopranos and mezzo-sopranos in mind when he wrote those words, they do seem to apply not only to singers but to most of the women who work in that vast world now known as “entertainment.” Opera lovers or, to give us a truer name, opera junkies would probably scorn the use of the term “entertainment” to describe that glorious thing that musicians do and that drives us wild, but it is foolish to believe that the same forces that govern film and theater would bow down in reverence before the muse of music and not make the same demands of singers they make of actresses. In a world of disposable bimbos, of actresses who can find work only so long as they can remain young, a world that has popularized vanity surgery, small dispensation is given to singers. Indeed, the demand is even more onerous, for singers not only must keep their youthful appearance but must preserve the fresh and youthful sheen that is one of the qualities that make the female singing voice so beautiful.
Reference to this surfaced more than once during our conversation, for von Otter was about to sing the role of Sesto—gloriously, as it turned out—the stepson of Cornelia in Handel’s Giulio Cesare. “I’m at an age now when it is not natural for me to be singing, at least not certain roles,” she observed with disconcerting honesty. “There are many younger singers, good ones, and I’m often the oldest one in the cast, as is the case with Giulio Cesare.” When asked if this demand for eternal youthfulness was more rigorous for women than for men, she considered for a moment and then said that, no, there were as many tenors and baritones as sopranos and mezzos among the vocal desaparecidos. But she did not deny that cultural forces make an audience more willing to accept a fifty-year-old Rodolfo than a Mimi “of a certain age.” Mezzos, who are seldom required to sing the role of the sweet young thing, have a greater chance at theatrical longevity.
Interviews are by nature perilous: the subjects must resist the normal human temptation to speak openly or to answer a question fully. And they must, alas, discipline themselves to resist the impulse to gossip. Singers, save perhaps in the privacy of their chambers, or maybe only in the shower, seldom speak badly of other singers, no matter how cunningly the interviewer attempts to seduce them into doing so. I once believed this resulted from fear that the chickens would come home to roost when and if the vagaries of casting put the gossip on the stage opposite the vilified colleague. This, however, presupposes that singers read interviews with other singers, which need not necessarily be the case. Nor does it result from the fear of getting a reputation as a disloyal colleague. I’ve come, over the years, to believe that their reticence results from nothing more than the fact that they sing, too. They also get out there in front of a thousand, two thousand, three thousand people and stake their reputation and peace of mind on the perfection of a single performance, sometimes on a s
ingle note. So singers are the only ones who really know, know from the inside, what it is like to be out there in the glow of the lights, and in the even sharper blaze of people’s expectations, when the most minimal errors can turn applause to jeers and whistles. Given this, their charity and forbearance are not at all surprising, nor is the fact that most singers will go no further than referring to a “bad performance.”
Proof of this came, as we continued to talk about the sell-by date that society has put on singers, when I named a certain tenor and suggested that he would stop singing only when a wooden stake was driven through his heart. She remained seated, though just barely, else I would be able to say that she leaped to his defense. Instead, she leaned forward in his defense and insisted, “His is still a great voice. And a great singer.” This impulsive generosity flashed out more than once when other singers were named, though she was less kind with certain conductors. Of one, she said, not without restrained regret, “He was my biggest fan fifteen years ago. He is no longer my fan.”
It quickly became evident that she is, with ample cause, conductor Marc Minkowski’s biggest fan. Handel’s Ariodante, which she recorded for DGG with Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre in 1997, after a series of concert performances, is a disc upon which hard-core Handel junkies have been known to OD. Even more moderate listeners join reviewers in judging it to be one of the best recordings ever made of a Handel opera, her interpretation of Ariodante the one against which all future performances of the role will have to be measured. With Minkowski she has also recently recorded Handel’s oratorio Hercules and a collection of Offenbach arias and scenes so delicious as to lead the listener to long to see her sing in a staged performance of any one of his operas.